BBC Life on Mars - Gene Hunt's Early Days in Greater Manchester Police
by Philip Glenister tomboy
Summary: A fan-fiction following Gene Hunt since he was a Police Constable beat officer in 1982 after graduating the Greater Manchester Police Academy, how he became the legendary police officer you see today in the 21st Century. Sequel to "Sleuthing For Gene Hunt" includes his childhood, what police were like as a little boy and the Guvs he used to work with in the 1980s-1990s.
1. Chapter 1

**This is an insight into DCI Gene Hunt as a fresh faced teenage police officer in 1980s Greater Manchester's Stopford House station and how he became the legendary police officer of both Greater Manchester Police and Metropolitan Police CID, you see today in the 21st Century.**

* * *

Gene Stephen Michael Hunt was born in 1963 in the south of the county of Lancashire (which is the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester). His childhood was very harsh because his father was an abusive drinker and corrupt police officer who often beat him and his brother Stuart due to a "harsh upbringing" in 1970s Manchester. In 1974 when Gene Hunt was nearly 11, the Manchester and Salford Police service merged under the Local Government Act of 1972 with parts of the Lancashire Constabulary and the Cheshire Constabulary to form the Greater Manchester Police.

As a 80s teenager; Gene was watching _The Professionals_ and wanted all the iconic Ford vehicles. Later on as a young adult he discovered that his little brother was a drug addict. Hunt attempted to reform him until he ran away from his family and was in prison ( _LOM_ Series 2: Episode 5). At the age of 17 in 1980, he performed his cadet duties in Greater Manchester Police Academy and fully joined the police two years later. In 1982, at the age of 19, Hunt became a Police Constable with Morrison as his mentor and guide.

In reality, he became a young police constable in 1982; he heard some squatters playing loud music and taking heroin on his first week on patrol as a constable, Hunt, Morrison, and their colleagues were on duty and presumed that some young people had broken in so he decided to investigate after receiving instructions over the telephone inside his Ford Granada Mk2 squad car. In order to enter the property, he kicked the door open and had some very close shaves as one of the suspects had a very nasty grudge against police officers.

The person DI Alex Drake remembers taking her hand as a child was a teenaged Gene Hunt, since he was 19 and she was 8 at the time of the blue Ford Escort Mk3 Ghia car bomb accident; confirming the ten year gap between them and her parents Caroline and Tim Price's death took place in that same year but in October 1982. It was only a few weeks old being on a Y registration.

As a young Manchester constable, he worked with DCI Ray Carling — an old school copper born in 1934 who was accepting bribes from a local gangster, Gene's superior became a Police Constable (presumably for the Lancashire Constabulary) aged 19 after his two years of National Service; Ray started his patrol during the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. Seeing it was the right thing to do, Hunt reported Carling to his superior officers, which resulted in humiliation and Hunt losing his reputation. This is why as policing undergone a massive radical change in his early days during the 1980s and early 1990s he vowed to have a zero tolerance policy on corrupt police officers "When I'm DCI, there will be a zero tolerance policy against corrupt police officers breaking procedure!" whenever he had to watch brutal methods of policing or interviews going wrong; Hunt, despite his very young age brings them down during Operation Countrymen in 1983 at just nearly twenty. Gene Hunt was battling to put an end to police corruption and searching for officers who are fabricating and disposing of evidence at the time.

In 1988 Gene Hunt was promoted to Detective Inspector and transferred to "A" Division, CID of the Stopford House police station under DCI Harry Woolf, who became his mentor. From 1997, Hunt was promoted to Detective Chief Inspector by Harry Woolf (who had been promoted to Detective Superintendent).

During 1995 apprehended a man attempting to steal Gene's car (Ford Sierra Sapphire) using a screwdriver to circumvent the Ford keycode system and take without consent. DI Gene Hunt did get his beloved Ford Sierra Mk2 Sapphire back, but this surprise assignment led to the cost of one of GMP's Woman Police Constables struggling to fight for her life in hospital with severe blood loss. However her current status is not known and very little has been found since then.

As the Detective Chief Inspector of Manchester CID (1997 to 2003), Gene Hunt is respected by the subordinate members of his team. When 27 year old DC Sam Tyler arrives at CID in the first promotion, Hunt is quick to make it clear that he is Tyler's superior. He demonstrates his willingness to report corrupt police officers; even though the bad days of violent police officers in CID were long gone - — a practice which he continued since local crime boss Stephen Warren murdered a girl for helping him and it was a manifesto he held close to his heart since starting his first patrol in 1982 as a beat copper; Gene believes there is a fine blue line between police officer and criminal in which its boundaries should never be crossed.

The goal is very clear: locking up bad people. He is initially disdainful of female police officers, when still a teenager in the 1980s but however he tolerates WPC Annie Cartwright promotion to CID in the intervening years of the 1990s, and accepts her as a part of the team.

XXXXXXX

 **2003 onwards**

Shortly thereafter, Hunt transferred out of the Greater Manchester Police in 2003, to the Metropolitan Police Service, alongside Detective Sergeant Dean Carling, DCI Sam Tyler and Detective Constable Chris Skelton.

During the first year, DCIs Gene Hunt, Sam Tyler and DI Alex Drake begin to notice that files, computer drives and evidence have gone missing. Eventually it is revealed that Chris Skelton had been paid large sums of money to undermine the investigation into Operation Rose, and had done so in order to pay for his wedding to Shaz Granger.

It sees DCI Gene Hunt divorced, and having replaced his trademark Ford Scorpio with a Ford Mondeo; nearly 40 year old Eugene Hunt remains as determined as ever to crack down on crime in his area of London (Fenchurch East).

He has become somewhat more professionally mature in his behaviour, secure in his authority, and organised in his approach since the 1980s as a young beat copper. He has embraced all aspects of modern policing, but way back in the 1980s and early 90s as a very young Manchester police officer was convinced that old-school policing methods are on their way to being excised from the force, along with the officers who still practice them for good reason.

Without informing those involved in Rose that Skelton has been discovered, Hunt gets him to gain information undercover. It is revealed that Rose is the code name for an upcoming robbery of a van carrying gold-bullion, masterminded by elderly corrupt ex police officers. Christopher Skelton eventually comes to respect and to try to emulate Sam Tyler along with Gene Hunt, since they're the two senior police officers of Fenchurch East's Metropolitan Police station. DCI Gene Hunt also helps Skelton overcome his clumsiness, nervousness, and naivety. With this Chris's confidence, maturity, and policing skills are seen to have improved.

DCI Gene Hunt characterizes his younger self as "skinny," headstrong, and full of male bravado circa 1988, seeing a mirror of himself in DC Chris Skelton and DCI Sam Tyler when he rose through the ranks during the Eighties and Nineties era as a "cheeky, but likeable character".


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter two of BBC Life on Mars "Gene Hunt's Early Days in Greater Manchester Police" finds him and Sam working with a Metropolitan Police Superintendent when an elderly ex Greater Manchester Police officer confesses to some of the historical false convictions during the Seventies and Eighties on his death bed in Greater Manchester NHS intensive care ward.**

* * *

Gene walked around his city, watching people going by their daily routines, watched the cars on the Princess Parkway... surveyed his kingdom. Felt the love he held for his city, for its inhabitants, the pride he took in being responsible for their safety, the joy he derived from protecting them and pursuing those who had brought harm to them. He also felt immensely happy at the thought that he lived in modern times, that technology and modern medicine had helped to make him able to return to his task this fast. It also made his job so much easier, modern forensics being as developed as it was, computers easing the mission he and his colleagues were on.

No wonder there had been so many false convictions, no wonder a lot of his predecessors had turned to alcohol and violence, had worked with criminals instead of against them as he had read in those reports on policing in the 70s and 80s... DCI Gene Hunt smiled. He really was happy that today, those methods were extinct and banned from the police force. They were a clean bunch, and whoever didn't play by the rules was pursued by disciplinary measures and removed if necessary. He was immensely proud of his team, of the people he worked with. All up-to-date with the most modern procedures and rules. Gene took his job as a DCI very seriously and had made it clear on his first day after he had been promoted that this was what he expected from everyone working for him.

His post as DCI of the CID was still waiting for him. They had promoted his friend junior DCI Sam Tyler as a temporary replacement but had made it clear that they were eagerly waiting for his return once he had been cleared to be fit for work. Desk duty it would be in the beginning but him being a DCI and working in front of a computer and in conjunction with forensics a lot, this wouldn't mean that much of a constriction. And soon he would be able to return to full duty, he would make sure of that. Sam smiled at the thought of Gene returning to his office, to his gadgets, his beloved workplace. It would be different - Maya had changed departments and he was going to have to get used to a new DI.

"Sammy dude, c'mon you lazy bastard," as the junior DCI sat at his computer waiting for a email to ping up on the screen "We've been given an elderly ex copper's deathbed confession, that Super Chris Skelton wants us to solve." Gene grabbed his denim jacket, logged off his computer and headed straight to his treasured Ford Granada MkIII GLX saloon, heading straight to the hospital; after PCSO Annie Cartwright radioed him "870, I've observed three or four former Greater Manchester Police officers, you know the ones our Superintendent worked with as a DC?"

"Err, no Sammy and I would have only been little kids in those days," blushed the senior Detective Chief Inspector "Why has the old DI confessed to several miscarriages of arrests, thirty or forty years later? No wonder I wanted to clean the station of corruption since I was 19 years old in 1982 and vowed to banish these police bullies when I became DCI myself!" stated a shocked DCI Gene Hunt, who went in even more confused than when the case first came around in the briefing room.

Superintendent Chris Skelton, one of London's finest, puts the phone receiver down and rubs his face tiredly. He'd heard about the murders, of course. A former Detective Inspector had always talked about them happening again in thirty years time and, as the years had gone on, he'd started to believe him.

It was Annie's mother who had pointed out the single sentence he'd missed in the news report. She'd also pointed out that this man insisted he was a DCI. Chris doesn't doubt him now, but he feels as if his life is spiralling out of control. From the same old, same old television drama in a two-minute phone call. There are no co-incidences, of course, and Chris knows that he's finally got his man.

Gene picks up the phone again and dials a number once forgotten.

DCI Robert Standing (retired) rambles on about the old days in Greater Manchester Police CID during the 1970s-1980s. He pulls on his jacket, the one he never got round to throwing out and walks down the corridor to the room at the end of Greater Manchester's NHS intensive care unit.

The old former DI man in the bed is thin and emaciated, kept alive only by the wonders of the modern age. He knows that nowadays his former Guv would be in front of Discipline and Complaints. The strange Detective Inspector is dying and nothing can change that, but an old man who is an ex copper can't do anything to hasten the end. This is where it ends for the 68 year old ex Detective Inspector copper and nothing can change that either.

DCI Sam Tyler sits down with his right hand man Gene and prepares to wait.

DI Peter Kirk can't remember why he agreed to this. He's pretty sure you can only have two people at a bedside at any one time. Plus he's rather confused as to whom he is supposed to be arresting. Superintendent Skelton insists he's cleared it all with his boss, but Peter can't imagine how the boss would agree to the two geriatric men and the Super's wife coming along. Ex-coppers, the lot of 'em, here to be in on solving a case over thirty or forty years old, back when DCIs Gene Hunt and Sam Tyler was barely out of nappies.

He shakes his head to clear those thoughts and walks through the doors. The room is dimly lit and he almost misses the man sat back in the shadows to one side of the bed. He looks tired and out of place, as if his time was long ago and he's only just realised this. Peter's companions stiffen as the man in the chair nods to each of them then slowly stands, holding his hands out in front of him. Peter has finally got his man.

As he starts to read the man his rights, the old one, the one who looks as if he's been dying for a fag for the last thirty years, leans over him and proclaims loudly: "Robert Standing, you're nicked".

Slowly Gene walked back in the direction of his flat, checking his mobile for new messages while he moved through the streets.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3 finds DCI Gene Hunt chasing up ex police officers from Greater Manchester Police when their approaches to policing are on his and DCI Sam Tyler's books as a jumbo set of unsolved crimes, but their predecessors approach to policing leave him angry as Gene strongly believes there is a fine line between coppers and criminals which should never be blurred. A couple of the cases upset PCSO Annie Cartwright particularly one where a young child at the time was accused of scratching the then Detective Chief Inspector's bronze Ford Cortina Mk3 with the line of "Anything happens to this motor, I'll come around your houses and stamp on all your toys. Got it? Good kids!" sound familiar to any BBC Life on Mars UK fans?**

* * *

In 2006, they were all fighting for a promotion, a better position, more money, more respect. Gene Hunt had fought hard to become a DCI that young, and he had to constantly prove himself to his superiors as well as his subordinates in order to keep that position. It was a constant battle. exchanging information merely via e-mail, networks, telecommunication. Of course, having all data ready at the tip of your finger, obtaining it by pressing one or two buttons was a dream for every crime fighter!

DCI Gene knew that police corruption from the past did irrevocably change the relationship between the public and the police. He just remembers the Chopper bikes with the gear stick console in the middle, Corgi cars, dreamt of a Ford Cortina Mk3 GXL in bronze and all the cool games of the Seventies as Gene was just a little kid then when Greater Manchester Police CID was full of corruption with false convictions and locked up the criminals of Seventies Manchester, whether evidence pointed to them or not regardless.

PCSO Annie Cartwright was not even born until 1979; when Gene is in the collators den on one of the slim LG desktop computers showing her the archives typing in past colleagues names. The computerised files represents everything that is bad about the police force, everything that the force has tried to stamp out over the last 30 years.

"You know PCSO Cartwright, I thought I put a stop to police corruption since I first started as a fresh faced teenage police constable in this very GMP building aged 19 in 1982 and supposing our predecessors shocking approaches to policing is coming to light as a bunch of unsolved crimes?!" simmered DCI Gene Hunt who was feeling peeved off about having to chase up ex police officers past their prime for things they did approximately 30 years ago. "Annie, make us a cup of tea and [bring] a chocolate from one of the vending machines," when he was stuck on the landline phone asking if older colleagues remember the names he read off a freshly printed Microsoft Word list from the NARPO database inside his office. "Hi, do you remember DCI - Garrett, I was only just starting out in the years 1982-1987? We're investigating historical police corruption done by retired members of Greater Manchester Police CID; he checks the records and discovers that there never was someone like himself working in Manchester in 1973.

Annie gets herself and Gene a Kit-Kat Chunky each from the vending machines near Custody with teas in coffee cups walking back to the CID department via the elevator lift, the CID smells of disinfectant, is decorated in matching hints of white and blue; is a clean, bright and fine contemporary example of a modern day police station. "They'll be on eBay by Christmas!" said DCI Gene Hunt jokingly when he's answering e-mails at his slimline desktop computer.

They are repulsed by their predecessors attitudes to crime-solving; the ageing ex police officers of GMP are racist, sexist, conduct searches without warrants and think fitting someone up is OK as long as they deserve it. The Stopford House police station in those days was full of cigarette smoking, gum chewing, unreconstructed men in a dark, bland coloured and dank Criminal Investigations Department (then known as 'A' Division). When Sam discovers that Gene's reluctance to deal with the ageing ex police officers stems from an incident way back in Gene's past (1982-1987) he helps his senior fellow DCI out to help him find the ghosts that have bothered Gene since he was a teenage Detective Constable finally getting them caught for historical police corruption.

XXXXXXX

Gene can just about recall the episode "Kid's Stuff" (broadcast on 30 March 1971) of Z-Cars when he was nearly eight "There was an episode of Z-Cars that left an impression on nearly eight year old me in 1971 in which children get accused of committing crime by hard nosed coppers."

Gene Hunt's respect for proper procedure and 21st-century mentality clash with his former bullying boss; he gets to go and visit the – presumably rather elderly by now – DCI Garrett and WPC Phyllis Dobbs, it is a bit freaky for the old people seeing an adult Gene Hunt and Sam Tyler thirty-odd years later, aged not a day, though.

Another theory could be that a very old ex DCI Stephen Hunt (Gene's father) ran his elder son's best friend over in 2006 six months previously with the blue 1988 Vauxhall Cavalier Mk2 on Mancuanian Way; there's a show on the television about cops in the 70's and Sam imagines he's a part of that while in hospital recovering from the road traffic collision. Stephen Hunt is Gene's estranged Dad and was sent back to 1973 with Sam after crashing his car when he ran Sam over in the very first episode.

He says: "I think this is very typical of CID before the mid-1980s when a variety of reforms kicked in slowly, but which transformed the whole world of criminal investigation and the way suspects are handled. But as a portrayal of detectives before that, it's as accurate as you can get in writing." Gene Hunt said as he drove his beloved Ford Mondeo

"I knew some of the Detective Chief Inspectors who were so tough that they would have regarded me Gene Hunt as being a 22-carat nancy boy." the mullet bearing police officer was laughing at his own comment

Some 1970s rogue detectives bent the rules, or broke them completely. Determined to get a result after an arrest, they simply created false confessions for suspects which were later presented as hard evidence in court.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4 sees DCI Gene Hunt at a Greater Manchester Police conference about the unsolved cases of historical police corruption that happened while he and Sam were just starting out their high powered police careers in the 80s.**

* * *

"Maybe just because the Eighties is a bit nearer, while the Seventies does feel like a bygone age. It certainly felt like that when we were finding those ex coppers, whereas when Sam and I first started, in a funny sort of way it felt more modern and more recent," Gene says. "You see things in CID that you'd still see now in a police station like fax machines, the beginnings of computers, it's just they're a bit more modern now. Whereas in the 1970s our predecessors didn't have that, it was just a filing cabinet, typewriters and rotary dial telephones with a bottle of Scotch." DCI Gene Hunt and his faithful team preferred modern police methods of forensic science, interview techniques and psychological profiling.

Dressed today for the case conference in jeans and a casual jacket, he looked like a suburban Surrey school-run dad.

Gene is occasionally less pock-marked, although acne got his sex life off to a slow start as a teenager.

Recently he was followed for a week by a photographer in a van near the special needs school his children attend during the school run at 9:00 am in his brand new 2008 Ford Mondeo Titanium X in the maroon pink colour. "Oi! You lot! You nasty pinko tabloid journalists! Move along. There's nothing left to see here."

"There was something sinister about the whole thing as I had my two disabled kids with me, so I tapped on his window and he put the window down and I said, 'Why are you following me?' He said, 'I'm not.' I said, 'Come on, you are, and, you should know if you want to see me falling out of a nightclub you're 10 years too late, mate'. And he said, 'How did you know?' And I said, 'well I'm a f***ing detective'."

"What was your favourite thing about the case, DCI Eugene Hunt?" asked a Manchester Gazette news writer who knew Gene's team since their early days in the Eighties and Nineties "I was a young fart, just a kid in the 70s, watching _The Sweeney_ , and probably see the decade through the rose-tinted spectacles of a ten-year-old. The only bit I loved were the Fords they used back in the day like Cortina GXLs and Mk1 Granadas the cops drove." It is living proof that modern policing has come a long way from Sweeney-style coppering of the day.

"I looked forward to complaints trying to catch the ex police officers in this case since my Guv Harry Woolf couldn't catch his crooked colleagues first time round when the face of policing changed approaching the 90's, I was only still a teenage Detective Constable at the time and these older police officers couldn't adapt to the changing culture of policing." During the 1980s and early 1990s era he found himself working for the prejudiced and violent then DCI Ray Milton Carling to find a smoke-filled CID room full of aggressive, arrogant cops.

Gene is an honourable character and became very loyal to his profession by always following the rules and standing up against corruption. To Gene Hunt, there is nothing more disgusting than a bent copper. When he discovers that such people existed within his CID years ago, he is full of disdain. He has a soft side. During _the last part of the conference_ he speaks of Sam Tyler in glowing terms, describing him as a very good personal friend since childhood and as one of the best coppers he ever has on his team. Yet he trusts DI Alex Drake to bring them in on the Police corruption thread; Gene genuinely seems to care about the new Detective Inspector Alexandra Drake. There does, at times, seem to be genuine affection between the pair, especially as the pair have nicknames between themselves.

Sam, Gene and Alex all exist as small children in the 70s-80s. Sam never actually meets himself, just his own family, while Alex does finally meet herself when it is revealed that Gene Hunt was the teenage cop who rescued her during her parents murder in a Ford Escort Mk3 Ghia during 1982.


End file.
